


Choke Chain

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Femdom, Graphic depictions of violence - Freeform, Humiliation, Implied/Referenced Torture, Interrogation, Oral Sex, Rough Sex, Season/Series 01, Very Dubious Consent, non-consensual drugging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:33:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26054269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: Travis had known all his life what it meant to serve. He’d known what they demanded of you, which was everything: life, heart, soul, you were expected to hand it all over and more besides. When the Federation held out its greedy hands and demanded more, god help those who baulked.
Relationships: Servalan/Travis
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6





	Choke Chain

**Author's Note:**

> This fic came about as a result of the episodes Deliverance and Orac, which together got me shipping Travis/Servalan like burning. The shifting power dynamic between them, the glimmer of a conscience he shows in Deliverance over Maryatt's death and the way she tramples all over it... *hearteyes* That was also a scene which left me sort of wanting an AU where she doms the fuck out of him on that couch. This is the result, which grew a little in the telling and is pretty damn dark. 
> 
> I've only very recently started watching Blake's 7 and I've fallen head over heels in love with it -- why the hell did no one tell me how good it is? Aside from a couple of tiny ficlets, it's my first time writing anything for this show, so hopefully I've made a decent hash of it.

The mirrored wall of the exercise room cast his reflection back at him as he circled the columnar punching bag, sweating beneath unforgiving lights that bleached his skin sallow and made his facial prosthesis shine with a black glimmer, like oil streaks on water. The sweat running from his hair made it sit unevenly and it shifted as he moved revealing a sliver of raw skin, rubbed red-slick and shiny by constant friction.

Travis had been at it for hours, and had long since stopped bothering with his form. Easy enough to see in the mirror: he was messy, sloppy. No longer bothering to weave or keep his guard up, but slamming his fists into the punching bag again and again. The similarities between the art of boxing and the art of beating a man to death had turned out to be rather more superficial than he’d been anticipating.

With each blow, a puff of air escaped from the compacted vinyl; it almost – _almost_ – sounded human, and it still wasn’t enough. He dropped his weight back on his right foot, and jabbed with his prosthetic hand, thinking as he did so of cracked ribs, pierced lungs. A right hook, and it was a shattered nose, splinters of cartilage driven up to pierce the brain.

It was Blake’s face he saw, of course. And if he had one thing to thank those bitches for, it was this: they’d reminded him how pure and clean it could be to kill a man the simpler way, without guns or ships to complicate matters. To have Blake at his mercy, suspended from the ceiling, and the crunch of bone and cartilage shattering beneath his fists, rather than at a distance, divorced from the personal touch.

He wrapped his arms around the punchbag, his grip slippery with sweat, and drove his knee up into it. A slam from his elbow, and then a frenzy of blows, feeling the steel rod underneath impacting against his knuckles. What little control he had over his form slipped still further. He was dripping sweat and breathing hard, a snarl rising out of his chest as he drove himself on, relinquishing himself to savagery, to the urge to rip and tear.

As he bared his teeth in imagined triumph he felt a sharp little pinch as the face plate shifted position enough to cause him a stab of discomfort, not just on a raw patch of skin but deep in the eye socket. His last blow was a weak slap of his aching knuckles, and gasping, he stopped and clasped the punchbag for support.

In his mind Blake was laughing.

Travis pressed his forehead against the vinyl, forcing his breath to slow, imagining Blake. Broken and beaten, but he’d be laughing. And he’d keep laughing, right up until the moment Travis finished it.

The pulsing ache spread out from his eye socket, making his teeth ache and a wave of nausea roll upwards from his gullet. His mouth flooded with saliva, and he turned his head and spat, then slapped the punchbag and shoved himself away from it. And it was precisely because he didn’t want to look at the mirrored wall that he forced himself to do exactly that.

He was already sneering, his lip curling as his gaze fixed on the thin sliver of scar tissue that had been revealed by the shifting plate, the half-madness in his remaining eye. His hair sticking to his forehead in sweat-dampened curls. Like this, he could look at himself and see what they saw: a man who’d lost control. He wanted to shift the prosthesis back into place but again, because he wanted to so badly, because it hurt like a physical ache in his chest, he forced himself to wait, skin prickling as the sweat cooled.

He unwound the bandage on his right hand, flexing his bruised knuckles as he watched himself, his jaw clenching, the savagery receding as his heart slowed its pace, and only then, tossing the stained wrap aside, did he raise his bare hand to the face plate to realign it.

The metal had been warmed by his exertions and dampened by the sweat that had dripped from his hair. There was an ache in the hollow of his eye, echoed and answered by another somewhere deep inside his skull. Its surface was rough and pitted, as if to hint at the ruin of the face underneath, but that was rough field surgery for you. It made few concessions to delicate sensibilities. What mattered was that he was alive. He told himself sometimes that he would have gone without it completely if they’d let him, but knew he was lying to himself.

Carefully, he shifted it back into position, bracing himself for the stab of discomfort in the socket. It eased quickly. He passed his hand over it and pushed his fingers into his hair, eyeing himself with distaste, before he turned once more to the punchbag with a regained semblance of control which he doubted would last for long.

A jab and a right hook, followed by a flurry of punches, but it wasn’t the same, it wasn’t enough. What he needed was the impact of fists against real flesh rather than imagined, his bruised knuckles aching for a reason rather than simply because the vinyl cushioning was too thin for this sort of treatment. He wanted the crunch of bones and the splatter of blood, and not to know that it was never going to come to this, that this one thing, so small in itself, considering everything he’d sacrificed during the course of his service to the Federation, would never be his.

It didn’t seem like that much to ask, but he knew they’d never hand Blake over to him. They’d denied him even the opportunity to interrogate him, back when Travis had first been instrumental in his capture, but if it had been up to him, then none of this would have happened. And yet they then had the fucking gall to blame him for their mistakes.

He slammed his right fist into the punch bag, and it still wasn’t enough. He kicked it in frustration, then driven by adrenaline, he spun and punched the mirrored wall. The glass splintered, cracks cobwebbing out from the crater made by his flesh. The crunch of glass and bones, even if those bones were his own, brought him the kind of satisfaction that had long been lacking, and the pain, which was real at least, unlike the illusory pain he felt in his missing arm, came as a relief. It flared bright in his knuckles, fierce enough to make his eye water.

He closed the fingers of his prosthetic hand around his fist and squeezed. He was pretty sure he’d broken a bone or two, but that was okay. It would heal.

It had been worth it.

  
  


* * *

  
  


He’d gone to see Blake on Earth once, during the interstitial period when the Federation had been foolish enough to think they had him under their thumb. Not that hard to get access to his dome: they’d all but kept him on display like an exhibit in a zoo for anyone who wanted to go and gawk at the famous reformed dissident. Both as warning and as bait.

Travis hadn’t been back to full health at that point. The worst of his physical injuries had mostly passed, but there remained some concerns about his psych evals: nightmares that came and went with varying severity, unpredictable waves of black rage, a growing disinclination to take orders. And of course that was the one that bothered them the most.

He’d sat, stony-faced, the facial prosthesis sitting over still-healing raw skin, with every part of him in pain, because to resort to analgesics would be to show weakness, staring down the therapist they’d saddled him with.

At least he got a better class of doctor these days. Back then, the therapist had been so intimidated by him that he’d gone from arrogant confidence to stammering under Travis’s cold-eyed glare. He was little more than a boy, fresh-faced and handsome, and had been too inexperienced to stop himself from grimacing the first moment they met and he saw what had happened to Travis’s face. He had spent the next twenty and a half minutes of the worthless bureaucratic exercise in box-ticking and arse-covering pointedly looking anywhere but at Travis and mumbling questions at his console while Travis answered in resentful monosyllables. This boy had never seen an instant of action in his life, and yet he thought he knew how coming less than a hair’s breadth to death might affect a man.

He hadn’t known what he wanted until he saw Blake. He’d never exactly put his reason for going to that particular dome into words: he was too tired and sore to think it through beyond a wish to bring himself what the therapist had called closure. Travis preferred the term ‘catharsis’. He’d spent so long on his cat and mouse pursuit of Blake, the hours spent studying the man and his methods, the net slowly tightening as Travis closed in. And now it was all out of his hands. He’d thought, again without consciously acknowledging it, that he was capable of putting it behind him. He’d been injured in the line of duty, a risk which he’d always accepted as a possibility. Blake had been faster, that was all. Nothing personal. No hard feelings. Travis considered himself a reasonable man.

And then he saw Blake. Eating his lunch in the canteen with his new colleagues, a couple of men and a woman, and all of them hanging on his every word. Travis was still in pain; he never had a moment free from agony, but Blake was _fine_. He was smiling. He was even laughing, while Travis curled his hands into fists beneath the melamine table, his anger like a living thing seething in his chest _._

Blake’s scars were all internal, wrinkles left in the brain by the procedures he’d undergone. They might cause him problems down the line – seizures, hallucinations, terrifyingly lucid dreams: Travis had read every word of the literature he could get his hands on during his convalescence – but it wasn’t much consolation that Blake might get bad dreams twenty years down the line while Travis was waking up screaming almost every night _now_.

He already knew almost everything there was to know about Blake. A personable man, and clever. Ruthless, too, when he had to be, but most of all, he was likeable, and from the looks of things nothing had changed: he was making friends already. Alphas who hadn’t had to scrap for their position, well-educated, Earth-born, and none of them had ever known a moment’s want in their lives. Blandly carefree, like children, drugged to the nines on suppressants, and trusting and stupid enough to allow themselves to be charmed by a man who even with his mind fucked over charmed without even having to try. As Travis watched, Blake tilted his head towards the woman, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he listened to what she had to say. His hand on her arm, the touch easy. Like he didn’t have a care in the world.

Some of Blake’s _friends_ would have been deliberately placed to keep an eye on him, and to watch for anyone attempting to make contact, but not all, and he was so angry he couldn’t breathe, swilling down the bitter taste in his throat with coffee flavoured with an acrid chemical tang.

He still didn’t know whether he’d be able to go back to active duty or if they’d pension him off to a backwater colony, the sort of shithole he’d done everything in his power to escape, while Blake, who was a resister, a political criminal, lived out the normal span of his allotted life in the luxury he’d been born to and to which he should have relinquished any right.

And all right, so he was little better than an animal in a zoo, the job was a farce, and he’d be watched and spied on every minute of every day for the rest of his life, but it wasn’t as if Travis would ever exactly be free of Federation scrutiny either.

He shoved himself up from the table so abruptly his chair scraped against the floor. The sound drew eyes his way, Blake’s among them.

If he’d had a gun, chances were Blake would have been dead then and there, and then it would have been Travis who’d be made an example of.

He’d wonder later how they would have spun it, whether they might have framed him as a traitor or a madman, or punished him quietly and covertly while setting up another fool to take the fall. Either way, there’d be repercussions, but at that moment, he didn’t give a damn.

For the first time in his life Travis was chafing at the control of the Federation, at their leash drawn around his throat, tightening like a choke chain when he yanked against it.

One of the men was watching him. Hard eyes. A hand moving beneath the surface of the table, to where no doubt he carried a concealed weapon. He’d been recognised. He wouldn’t get within five paces of Blake before he was dropped, not unarmed. He had no choice but to let the bastard go on living his happy, smiling, drugged-up life, blissfully unaware that it was all a lie.

And for all that he still had a chance. The chaperone bollocksed up, somehow allowed them to to come face-to-face when Blake, with his customary unpredictability, chose the moment Travis was leaving to make his way to the toilets. And while the chaperone scrambled up from the table with a face the complexion of curdled milk and an expression that suggested he was cursing himself with every swearword known to man, Travis stood frozen in indecision with the itch on the back of his neck that told him there was a gun trained on him. Blake, meanwhile, was giving him a look that was growing all too familiar.

There weren’t many faces like his on Earth. What self-respecting Alpha civilian would put themselves in a position to get half their face scorched away by a rifle blast? And the drugs reduced them to little better than children who hadn’t yet learned it wasn’t polite to stare, until a glare loaded with menace made them look away.

He was getting used to being stared at, but not by the very man who’d done this to him, and not when that man’s blown-pupiled eyes were wide and honest and filled with pity.

“Sorry,” Blake said, gesturing to the doorway. “May I...”

His face felt rigid, his breathing shallow and fixed, drawn in through flared nostrils. He thought of grabbing Blake by the scruff of the neck, slamming him face-first into the door frame. The chaperone had a weapon partially concealed in his hand, his knuckles white, ready to fire if he made the slightest move.

Jaw clenched, Travis stepped aside with a sarcastic flourish that drew an odd look from Blake, who by now had caught something of Travis’s mood. His gaze skittered away from the prosthesis with the fearful revulsion that meant he’d be keeping his head down from now on, unwilling to make further eye-contact. Once they’d had their fill of staring, they never looked back.

Except that Blake did.

“Thank you,” he said, and made to move past. But as he did, his gaze slid back to Travis’s face and fixed on his one remaining eye. He stopped so suddenly he almost stumbled, uncertainty flaring in his eyes. It lasted only a moment, then, tamped down by doubt, it faded, and he moved past Travis with a mumbled apology, clearly shaken. The moment had passed. The chaperone glared at him. Travis gave him a tight nod and rocked on his heels, hands clasped in front of him. All innocence, as if he hadn’t just been fantasising about cracking Blake’s skull open like an egg. His mind, however, was elsewhere, bringing up that all-too-brief flicker of doubt in Blake’s eyes. Such a little thing, it might have meant nothing, but...

_He remembers me._

Which, if the procedure had worked correctly, ought to have been all but impossible. Any discrepancy was a crack that widened over time, eroded by events and renewed connections in the brain. Even the Federation couldn’t eradicate memories completely, only throw up walls around them, and the inconvenient elasticity of the human brain meant it was often far too good at healing itself: prone to rerouting its network of neurons and synapses to get its way around obstacles. The procedure didn’t always take.

Travis was a practical man, a patient man. Or he had been, anyway, before he’d been wounded. Certainly, he was clear-headed enough once the first fresh wave of rage had ebbed to recognise that killing Blake like this wouldn’t have been enough. What was the good of vengeance if the target never knew who or why? It would have been like shooting a fish in a barrel, if, that was, the fish was guarded by a moray eel that could have taken a man’s hand off.

But there was a chance the conditioning could fail, and if that happened, if a time ever came when Blake lost the protection of the Federation, Travis would be waiting.

In the end, it took four years.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The Federation only gave out a limited number of chances, and you never quite knew how many chances you’d get. The humiliation of having Blake within his grasp, only to lose yet again, was bad enough without the scrutiny of the council. They were squeamish, that was the trouble, baulking at his record and his reputation, as if they’d ever given a damn before the long shadow he cast began to fall on them. Up until then, they’d been happy for him to play the butcher, and they were happy to now, so long they could maintain enough distance that when they threw up their hands in horror, their outrage might be believed.

More psych evals, more _insinuations_. Someone – and god help them if he ever found out who that person was – suggested that he might have conspired with Blake to let him go free. They picked over every detail, all the many and myriad ways he’d been negligent, mainly by not being fucking clairvoyant. How could he have known the mutoid would find the indigenous life forms on an uncharted planet ill-suited to her dietary needs? Or that Blake would prove so resourceful?

They trod the same ground over and over again, forcing him to repeat the story until his throat ached and his voice gave out, while they hunted mercilessly for any discrepancies in his account of events. It was a process that should have taken little more than a couple of days, but they held him for months, and everything he ate and drank in that time had the gritty chemical aftertaste that told him he was being drugged. His thoughts turned soft-edged, hazy, memories tangling together so that he couldn’t quite distinguish between events, not just all the times he’d encountered Blake, but the inquiry itself, the interviews running together until it felt like he’d done nothing but sit in that horribly comfortable chair, answering the same questions a thousandfold and never quite answering them right. He knew this feeling: he must have caused it in the past, the hunted animal instinct of a snare tightening around him, and his dread grew with every passing day.

When asked whether he and Blake had discussed the possibility of working together at any point, he hesitated, teeth grinding together, because he’d already recognised the trap.

“Yes,” he said finally, when the question was repeated. “It was suggested. By Blake.”

The investigator gave him an emotionless glance. “And your response.”

“The answer was no. Obviously.”

“But your response.”

“I laughed. The suggestion was ludicrous.”

“You made no attempt to deal with him then and there.”

His jaw clenched. His heart was beating a little too fast. The chair had been deliberately placed so he could just see a sliver of the screens that reported on his physiological reactions. Just enough that it kept drawing the eye, made him want to strain so he could see more, read for himself what answer the investigator had to be seeing there. He forced his gaze away, willing his heart to slow. Willing the world to stop reeling around him. Wondering about the investigator, so bland in appearance as to be all but faceless. The Federation had a thousand like him, mostly interchangeable. Whose side was he on? Was he neutral, or did he belong to the faction who felt Travis had outlived his usefulness? The odds weren’t in his favour, and that was an understatement. He drew air in through flared nostrils, out again.

“Of course I tried. I have already explained. Repeatedly. We were both held in a forcefield. There was nothing I could have done.”

No change on the investigator’s face, but Travis read the thought there anyway: _Convenient._ It was nothing more than paranoia, the drugs in his system, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that they wouldn’t have kept him so long unless they were up to something, building a case against him.

“At any point, did you consider agreeing–”

“ _No_.”

A deliberate pause. Thin bloodless lips parted to reveal weaselly little teeth. The first glimmer of emotion. The investigator did not like being interrupted.

“At any point,” came the question again, slower and more pointed, “did you consider _agreeing_ , and turning on Blake at a later juncture.”

“Blake isn’t a fool. He would have expected that.”

“It has been suggested that it would have been an advantage, however small, and that it seems strange that a man in your straitened circumstances should not have used every means at his disposal to ensure victory.”

His hands flexed. “Who suggested that?” No answer. Of course. But the investigator’s jaw tightened by a miniscule fraction. He didn’t like being interrupted and he didn’t like not being the one to ask questions either. Not that he ever actually asked questions, just posed statements as if they were indisputable facts, a technique deliberately intended to disorient minds affected by drugs. Travis should have curbed his tongue; he was never going to get an answer. “It would have made no difference.”

“You say you laughed.”

“Barely.”

“Because he amused you.”

“No. Because the suggestion was ludicrous. Coming from him it was an insult.”

“Coming from Blake, it particularly stung.”

“It was offensive.”

“You allowed an emotional response to prevent you from taking advantage of a potential opportunity that might have given you an edge and led to success.”

“ _No_.”

A pause. His eyes weren’t eyes, Travis realised, but shards of mirrored glass fixed into the sockets of his eyeballs. “It was not an emotional response,” the investigator said, turning those glassy eyes on him.

“It was not an opportunity that would have led to success.”

“In your opinion.”

“In my opinion.”

Another series of bleeps. The investigator held his gaze a moment, then slowly turned his head to regard the console. A trick of the light but his eyes seemed to remain fixed on Travis. The slick itch of sweat on his spine. Waves of feverish heat sweeping through him, his body flushing hot and cold. He wanted suddenly, desperately, to be sick.

“You were transported to the planet’s surface.”

He was so caught in the drug-fuelled sensations in his body, he’d lost the thread of the questioning, such as it was. “Yes...”

Another piercing bleep. An accompanying throb in his left temple. They’d had to shift the faceplate to fit the sensor, a girl trying to remain as emotionless as a mutoid but not quite managing it, her hands pushing his hair out of the way and her lips pressed together tightly in distaste. It wasn’t painful exactly, but the discomfort was another distraction. The cool air stung against a patch of raw flesh.

“We find no trace of this planet in our star charts. Nor any record of extra-sensory skills of that magnitude. The abilities you have described are unprecedented.”

“To the best of my knowledge, yes, but–”

“Blake’s ship has transporter technology.”

A fractional pause. An instant too long. “Yes.”

Sweat breaking out on his brow, the muscles in his face working independently of his conscious will and making the facial prosthesis shift. What were they implying? Could they believe it? Were they really suspicious of the number of times Blake had escaped him, or was it nothing more than a distraction while they searched through his record in search of something that was actually halfway plausible?

There was a jittery sensation in his chest, a fluttering pulse in his throat. Did he sound panicked? Or, conversely, did he sound too calm? If he fought the effects of the drugs, would they assume he had a reason to do so? Something to hide? There were any number of drugs they might have dosed him with – different interrogators had their own techniques, their own tricks, honed to an art form – but the one he would have chosen reacted with adrenaline, intensifying the drugs effects in a vicious never-ending circle.

There was nothing he could do. There was no answer he could give that would unravel the tissue of lies and confusion they were building around him, but even knowing that he kept searching for it anyway. Then there was something, a glimmer of a possibility, formless with with the promise that it could take shape at any moment and prove his salvation. He opened his mouth, reaching for it, but the words weren’t there. The machines blinked, a rippling shiver of lights streaming across the console. The investigator cast it a glance and tweaked something. Two taps of his left little finger. Was that good? Bad? The thought remained shapeless, frustratingly unclear.

Blake on Earth. Laughing. His hand on a woman’s arm. Glancing at Travis with doubt. Weary eyes, despite his smile. Pitying. _We could agree not to fight_.

Something rose to the surface of his thoughts, a snatch of a phrase from long ago, something gleaned from the little education he’d been able to scrabble together. _I am in blood,_ he thought, _I am in blood stepped so far_ , and he didn’t realise until the investigator lifted his head that he’d spoken aloud. He couldn’t remember the rest of it, just that one little fragment. The urge to laugh pressed against the inside of his chest. Whatever the test was, he was failing it. By now that had become very clear.

That unreadable gaze. Chips of mirror, shaped into lenses and set in the sockets, reflecting his own guilt back at him. What were they looking for? More to the point, were they going to find it? He knew only too well that if they wanted to, it wouldn’t make much difference whether it was there or not.

“Go on,” the investigator said.

“I can’t remember the rest.”

A nod. No surprise, as if his patchy education was only to be expected. “’I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more returning were as tedious as go o'er.’ Macbeth.”

_Oh. Shit._

He worked his tongue round his mouth in a hopeless attempt to moisten it, recalling his memories of the vid he’d watched as an adolescent, his restless boredom alleviated only by the fact that the play was relatively short and full of murders. “The women. The witches… They brought it to mind.”

A flimsy excuse, those shards of glass cast back at him. But the investigator only nodded. “I’m more of a Coriolanus man myself.”

Travis stared blankly. The investigator cleared his throat.

“You expected Blake to make an offer of that sort.”

And round and round in circles they went, the same questions, the same explanations, the constant insinuations that he was lying, and each time his answers changed by increments, and that was a good thing, he _knew_ from the interrogations he’d conducted himself that it was the answers that never changed which were the surest sign of guilt – and by now there was no denying that this was an interrogation, for all that it seemed gentler than usual on the surface – but knowing that didn’t help.

He wasn’t technically a prisoner. In theory he was free to come and go as he pleased, so long as he stayed in the dome, but whatever they were drugging him with induced a temporary agoraphobic effect, resulting in dizzying vertigo if he was away from his quarters for too long. Something about the itch of eyes following him, the stinging insult of having been stripped of his weapons in disgrace. He managed to keep it together, but the moment he was back in his quarters and the door closed behind him the tremor would start in his remaining hand. Another effect of the drug, same as how he couldn’t stop himself from going over the responses he’d given to the questions-that-weren’t-questions, searching for mistakes and errors of judgement, and in so doing reliving them all over again. He relived them in his dreams too, which were rare: hard to dream, when you barely slept. When he did dream they were horribly lucid things: Blake at the console and gazing at his soul laid bare. Blake posing the questions, putting those carefully coded insinuations so reasonably while the mutoid’s teeth worried at his throat.

It ought to have been a relief that he slept so rarely. And he had to admit that the light fittings were a piece of sadistic genius, if only because he couldn’t quite work out whether they were deliberate or not. They always hummed, a constant background noise he’d long become accustomed to, but often one would malfunction, a fizzing drone that stuttered intermittently, usually at the precise moment he was drifting off to sleep and loud enough to snap him back to wakefulness. Periodically a sullen handyman would turn up, poke around in the innards of the light fittings, and declare it fixed, but the malfunction always returned.

He wouldn’t have minded so much if he’d known it was a deliberate technique to wear him down, but it could equally have been the result of shoddy engineering, its seemingly perfect timing down to a combination of insomnia, confirmation bias, and drug-fuelled paranoia.

Not knowing drove him to distraction, almost as much as the insinuations being made, how close he’d come to death and how unlikely it was that Blake should have missed at such close range, implying… what exactly? That he’d conspired with Blake and agreed to be mutilated so that Blake could have his man on the inside? That _Blake_ had willingly agreed to the deaths of his fellow rebels? If he hadn’t hated Blake so much, Travis might have been insulted on his behalf.

It was so plainly nonsense. There was a laziness about it, a lack of effort he found offensive, and which was almost certainly deliberate. They didn’t bother to make the accusations even slightly believable, but kept them off-handedly dismissive instead, making sure he knew they were keeping him treading water in order to kill time while they got on with the matters of real importance. Just so he was aware he was wasting his time defending himself – and _Blake_ – against ridiculous accusations that no one believed, least of all the people who were accusing him of them. Everything he’d ever said or done was held against him, the tiniest of acts recast in a distorted mirror. But that was the way they worked. He couldn’t begrudge them that.

And then, at last, it was over, or seemed to be. It was accepted that for all his many failures it certainly appeared he’d acted in the Federation’s interests, and if that was not the truth, then it could not be proved. The planet remained elusive, but it was acknowledged that there were discrepancies in the star charts which supported his claims, as did the records of the attack ships, the testimony of the crews, and most importantly the mutoid who had acted as his second.

The lovely soulless Keiyera. A good thing she’d survived: had there been no second testimony from a direct eye-witness, the outcome might have been very different. As it was, he was grudgingly allowed to return to service, although it was made excruciatingly clear that it would be better for everyone concerned if he resigned his commission. Clinging on by his fingertips when it seemed all wanted him gone was hardly seemly. He might not be a traitor or a dissident, but he had still failed and the black mark on his record remained.

The constant low-level humiliations that comprised his life now rankled, but if they thought that would be enough to chase him off, they were mistaken. He’d tasted the chance of revenge, and it was inside him now, that hunger, clawing at the cavity within his ribs. He’d close his eye and see the moment when Blake looked to him, attempting reason. _We could agree not to fight_ , as if that could ever, _ever_ have been a possibility. Impossible not to see it as intentional, deliberately laying down the evidence of collaboration so that questions could be raised about his loyalties. Which it wasn’t, of course: Blake had never been that conniving. He was simply being his personable self. So practical, so _reasonable_. So willing to put their differences aside. It was infuriating.

Any misstep now would mean the end of his career. So he kept his head down, accepted the humiliations. Worked out his frustrations against the punchbag, which let off a little steam, although never quite enough. He did whatever assignments they set him, the dirty work that no one else wanted to do, which sent the message, not only to him, but to everyone, of how far his star had fallen. It was hell, and it was getting worse, and he took it, he took all of it, the quietly hushed conversations when he entered a room, the sidelong glances behind his back, the barely suppressed insubordination in a lower ranking trooper’s voice. He’d take it all, and more besides.

There was nothing he would not do, no humiliation he would not weather, in order to have Blake within his grasp again.

And then, after long weeks of increasing degradation and humiliation, Servalan summoned him.

  
  


* * *

  
  


He’d never quite know afterwards her purpose in the insult, whether it was simply one more in a series of petty cruelties, or whether there’d been a purpose to it beyond simply testing to see whether he’d lost his ‘fire’ as she called it. That way of thinking came of never having had to fight hard-scrabble for a place at the Federation’s table. He was too practical a man not to know when to put pride aside when he had no other choice.

The floral scent that was pumped into Servalan’s office never failed to give him a headache, but he was her creature these days, obedient to her commands, so long as she continued to give him what he wanted, which only came down to one thing now: the chance to hunt Blake. Perhaps he even thought he saw in her a touch of fellow feeling, the acknowledgement, although she’d never apologise for it, that the attempt to tame Blake had been one of the worst mistakes the Federation had ever made.

Not that he’d make the mistake of trusting her. She might have pulled him back from the brink of a certain court martial and lent him her support at a time when he’d thought his career was over, but she’d done so for one reason alone: because she valued his willingness to butcher her enemies without hesitation and without pity. Still, there seemed little point in shying away from his reputation now, and what was a few more dead dissidents in the grand scheme of things?

It might even save lives in the long run. Stamp a rebellion out without mercy and make examples of its ringleaders and perhaps that would dissuade others from rebelling too. It was a nice thought, one that kept many of his men sleeping at night. Him too, once upon a time, but he’d been doing this long enough now to know that it was bullshit. It was just what you told yourself so that you could keep doing it until you had no other choice.

As far as most in the council were concerned, he was already too far gone and should never have been brought back to active service. It was only this woman, who was not just beautiful, but exquisite, with a face that combined the fragile delicacy of bone china and the watchful and virtually unblinking eyes of a snake, who vocally supported him, and who held his life – and his career which might very well have been more important – in the palm of her hand.

He sat on her couch, uncomfortable because he’d rather have been standing, resenting her for her elegance and how she didn’t seem to be the slightest bit intimidated by him, for the decadence of this place with its sweetly scented air and her flowing white gown, as she spoke so calmly of murdering two men, and one of those men one of theirs, and a man who’d saved his life at that.

He took it in grimly, quietly acknowledging the way her confession had turned him into an accessory. Yet another door slamming shut behind him. He’d lost count of how many there had been. The method of control they had over him was so much more effective than the one they’d had over Blake – they’d made him complicit.

He steeled himself. He didn’t think he’d allowed his discomfort to show in his expression, but from the way her gaze lingered on him, perhaps he hadn’t hid his feelings quite as well as he’d thought. Or perhaps she’d been watching him, testing him for his reaction, and would have seen it whether it showed or not.

It was disconcerting the way she looked at him, even if only because it wasn’t the way other women looked at him, with distaste, naked fear, or revulsion. Even pity sometimes, although rarely for long. She almost certainly looked at everyone that way, an affect deliberately calculated to disconcert or entrance, and it worked. How many of her staff men did she have panting after her like she was a bitch on heat, salivating at the thought of fucking her, even if just for one night? How many had she given what they wanted, her body, or the promise of it at least? As distractions went, it was spectacular. He’d give Servalan her due: she knew how best to use the tools at her disposal.

Her gaze swept slowly over his face and came to rest on the prosthesis.

“Does it hurt?” she asked. There was not a trace of sympathy in her voice, only idle curiosity. She sat with her legs curled up behind her, her elbow resting on the back of the couch. Drapes of silk pooled around her, flowing like liquid, clinging to her body, breasts, waist, hips. A shimmering sort of scent rose from the folds with every movement, making his mouth water.

Unpleasing, she’d called his facial prosthesis the last time she commented on it. He could have said at the time that pleasing her in any other way than finding Blake was the last thing he cared about. Might have too, if they wouldn’t both have recognised the lie. It had been a long time since a woman looked at him without even the slightest trace of revulsion or fear – except for the mutoids, but they could hardly be termed women.

“It was designed to fit perfectly.”

“That wasn’t the question I asked.” She shifted position, reaching out to touch it. He moved without thinking, catching hold of her wrist before her fingers could so much as brush against it.

“ _No_.”

“No?”

He realised too late the weakness he’d shown, how it was as good as baring his throat to be ripped out. “No, _Supreme Commander_.” Instinctively he tightened his grip on her wrist, the prosthetic hand squeezing too tight, hard enough that her lips parted and she gave a pained gasp. Her eyes were gleaming as if this was the most delicious thing that had happened to her all day.

“Better,” she said.

He wrapped his fingers tighter as her gaze moved inexorably to the prosthesis and lingered there as if it fascinated her. Deep in his chest he felt a sharp, bitter stab of hunger. His thumb ran across the tendons of her slender wrist. The shivery perfume flooded his nostrils; he could taste it on his tongue, deep in his throat, and he opened his mouth reflexively to draw it in deeper. His fingers bit into her wrist, tight enough to grind bone against bone until he remembered himself and shifted his grip. He’d marked her, a red welt that would most likely bruise. An unwise thing to do, considering how much power she held over him, but he liked it at the same time, found there was a certain pleasure to be taken in the act of marking that perfect pristine skin.

She was, he thought, exactly the sort of woman who’d like it rough. He’d certainly present a change from the worshipful preening pretty boys she gathered around her. It was a delicate line to tread. A risk, but one worth taking?

He was already half-hard when she slipped into his lap, silk puddling around them. Her thumb traced his cheekbone on the whole side of his face, ran down his jawline to the corner of his lips. He opened them and bit gently at it. He placed his hands on her waist. Nothing beneath the dress; god forbid she spoil the line of the gown. He’d already suspected as much – he was an attentive man, detail-oriented – but good to have his assumptions confirmed all the same. He’d have been lying if he’d said he hadn’t been just the slightest bit curious. The silk snagged on the calloused fingers of his right hand as he slid it up to cup her breast, the nipple stiff against his palm.

She brought her lips to his and held them there, not yet kissing him, but so close her breath warmed his skin, So close he’d barely have had to move his head to kiss her. He kept his body still, hands at her breasts, enjoying the moment of suspension, the way the seconds stretched out, warm and sweet as honey. Her fingers ran through his hair, scratching in slow circles at his scalp and sending a shiver prickling over his skin. He pressed back against the couch with a minute shifting of his hips, arching upwards towards her.

Her lips glided over his, still without touching, without so much as a brush of skin on skin, as she brought her mouth to his ear and repeated her question, more slowly, less tolerant of a refusal to answer.

“Does it hurt?”

“Sometimes.” He kissed her throat, slid his tongue against her skin. The bitter taste of her perfume lingered there, mingling with the sweetness of the fragrance.

“Your eye?” She caught hold of his jaw and tilted his head backwards so she could study his face, her gaze moving from the whole to the ruined side, and back again. A proprietary gesture, the sort that one might use on an animal. But he could indulge her in that and he liked the feel of her fingers on his skin, so he let her do it.

“The prosthesis itself. It rubs from time to time. It’s an irritant more than anything.”

“Only from time to time?”

 _Constantly_.

When he didn’t answer, her grip on his jaw tightened. The muscles in his neck tensed, and he might have pulled away if at that moment she hadn’t kissed him, open-mouthed and passionate, as though his deformities no longer mattered, as if she no longer found him _unpleasing_. Or perhaps they added an edge to this encounter that she appreciated. Either way he didn’t much care.

“Do you ever remove it?” she asked, breaking off the kiss. Travis gritted his teeth, catching hold of her hips. She was moving her lower body in a way that was particularly distracting.

“Only at night,” he managed.

“When you’re sleeping?”

“Yes.”

Her hand was creeping up to the left side of his face. He stiffened, stilling the movements of his hips, his mouth flattening into a hard line. “Tell me something, Travis,” she said, her voice sweet, but with an edge of cruelty. “Are there ever times when you wake up thinking yourself whole? Until you look in the mirror and remember?”

His hands tightened on her waist, his jaw clenching.

Servalan raised an eyebrow. “Travis.”

“Yes,” he hissed through gritted teeth.

She nodded slowly, running her thumb along his cheekbone, just beneath the edge of the prosthetic. “He might have done a better job,” she said slowly, softly.

“Who?”

“The medic who saved your life.”

When he twitched, she kissed him again, and now she wasn’t just passionate, but actively violent, her hand bunching in his hair as she pressed her body against his. His momentary surprise – the stab of certainty that she couldn’t have known what she was saying, that she hadn’t made the connection between Maryatt and the medic who’d saved him – was swept away by the certain knowledge that she did in fact know exactly what she was saying, then that too was swept away in its turn as she forced her tongue between his lips.

He channelled his anger by matching her violence for violence, yanking at the hem of her gown, and taking a vicious pleasure in how he was ruining the silk, ripping it, crumpling it in his fists. Marking it the way he wanted to mark her. He splayed his hands across her buttocks, her underwear more flimsy silk, cobweb-fine. He gripped her hips as they rolled in a slow tormenting circle against his cock, and then she was rising up, pushing him sideways to lie on the couch. She straddled his chest, fingers playing through his hair, one moment soft and caressing, the next tugging so hard it was painful. Drawing her closer, he dug his fingers into the creases where her thighs meet her buttocks. Her skin was perfect, smooth and unblemished except for the red welt he’d left on her wrist. That was going to leave a bruise. No imperfections tolerated, he thought, and his lips drew back in a bitter smile. At least he’d leave something of himself behind, even if it would fade given time.

At her urging, he pressed his open mouth over the thinly stretched silk of her underwear, drawing the scent into his mouth. Earthy, sweet, the first thing about her which struck him as real. Sucking lightly at her through the silk, he felt her shiver with a sound of approval. He pulled her legs apart, hooked his fingers beneath the gusset and tugged it to one side, while she stroked his hair as if she was coaxing an animal. The tips of his fingers brushed against her, found her slick and wet and ready, and he growled deep in his throat, pressed them a little deeper, while he closed his lips around her over the taut cover of silk, mouthing at her through the fabric. It was already damp, and he soaked it still further with his saliva as he swirled his tongue against her.

His cock was trapped and uncomfortably hard, clamped close to his thigh by his leather uniform and so far ignored. When he slipped his fingers deeper still, spreading her open, a hard knot of arousal and anger tightened in his throat, at himself for wanting her this badly, at her for making him want her. With one twist of his fingers he tore away the fragile scrap of silk and crumpled it in his fist as she ground down against him.

He tightened his grip on her thighs, crushing her against his mouth as she jerked her hips in rough little circles, and that was fine, he thought, again with that grim little smile;, if rough was how she wanted it – and he’d suspected as much – he’d be _more_ than willing to grant her wish.

And then her hand slipped from his hair to run over his facial prosthesis. Anger squirming in his chest, he twisted his head away and grabbed her thighs to pull her away.

Servalan yanked on his hair, wrenching his head back, forcing him to meet her gaze. She was breathless, her lips parted, shining with saliva, but her eyes were hard and filled with warning. “Don’t forget your place, Travis.”

Through gritted teeth, he hissed, “I wouldn’t dream of it, Supreme Commander.”

She’d almost torn out a clump of his hair. His scalp burned as she forced his head back against the couch. Breathing hard, muscles bunched so taut he was trembling, he held himself still as she released his hair and pushed it back from his forehead. “Good man,” she said softly. “You know I’ve always had a deep admiration for your dedication to your duty.”

Her fingers slid down again, found the edge of the facial prosthesis where it ran into his hairline, then they were slipping over the surface of the metal itself, so lightly he couldn't tell whether she was touching it or not. That he could have thrown her off with ease only made the moment more painful. He lay, pinned to the couch by the meagre weight of a woman he ought to have been able to snap like a twig, speechless with rage, humiliation, and an equivalent amount of darkly twisting desire.

Her thumb found the metal bulge of his eye socket, and lightly increased its pressure, making him jolt at the sudden discomfort. She gave a sigh of pleasure, her thumb gliding in slow circles as she brought herself back to his mouth. He wouldn’t have thought it possible but his cock hardened still further with the knife’s edge of shame and dark arousal as she gave another cursory tug of his hair to spur him into action once more. And another, harder, when he didn’t immediately obey.

Grimly, Travis set to work. His jaw was already aching, but she didn’t give him the chance to adjust, and didn’t seem to care too much whether he could breathe either. It felt less like pleasuring her than being used, and it filled him with a sick bleak joy, just as the violence of her kiss had.

When she eased away, he jerked his hips upwards, bucking beneath her. “Touch me,” he demanded. Thinking that it was the least she could fucking do. Her hand slid over his cheek, and down, and he heard the sound of her fingers slipping inside herself. When she brought them to his lips he sucked on them greedily despite his resentment.

“Very soon,” she told him softly.

 _Now_ , he wanted to say, but it wasn’t as if he was in a position to make demands, in any sense. Her fingers were still in his mouth, pressing his tongue down, deep enough that he almost gagged. A reminder, as if he needed one, that she could do what she wanted with him. It was only a question of how far he’d let her go, and what price he’d pay if he put an end to it. Would she deny him his command, his chance to capture Blake? And that was assuming, of course, that he _wanted_ to put an end to it.

There were certain consolations, he thought, even as she lowered herself back down. His fingers bit into her flesh, pressed inside her as he parted his lips and sucked her clit between them. He made no attempt to be gentle – he was too angry to be gentle – and all but stabbed his fingers inside her, twisting them with no art or care, just the urgent need to make her come as fast and as brutally as he could. Her movements were becoming more urgent, fast little spasming jerks of her hips, and when she came, with a shudder that wracked her whole body, her thighs clamped tight around his head cutting off his air for a moment. Then she went still, letting him swallow up the last moments of her pleasure before she gave a contented sigh and eased away.

Travis stared up at her with mute resentment and naked want. She smiled and cupped his chin, her thumb tracing his lips.

When she finally gave a nod, he pulled himself up into a sitting position, rolling his shoulders. Humiliation coiled through him like smoke, but he still desperately wanted her. When she straddled his lap he wrapped his arm around her lower back as she kissed him, slower than before, tasting herself on his lips and tongue.

The prosthesis had shifted, so that a sliver of ridged scar tissue would be showing, but he was damned if he was going to adjust it now in front of her. Instead he gave himself up to the kiss, his hands sliding down her waist as he reeled in his own urgency, forcing himself to slow down as one bitterly triumphant thought sounded in his mind: _Not so ‘unpleasing’ now, am I?_

“There’s still a lot to prepare,” she said.

“I’ll get started,” he said, then dropped his head and sucked a nipple into his mouth before he reached for the fastenings of his uniform. “Just as soon as–”

“ _Now_ , Travis.” Her voice was clipped, but still warm with pleasure. Then she was disentangling herself, rising to her feet. Her fingers curled at the back of his skull, lingering there a moment as she gazed down at him with an expression he couldn’t quite read – amusement, contentment, indulgence. Something of the sort. And for all that her dress was in ruins, stained with his saliva, torn and crumpled, when she strode to her desk she moved with the same composure and confidence she always did, her one concession to her appearance a hand smoothed over her close-cropped hair.

She couldn’t be serious. Thrown, he stared at her, lust shading back to anger. He started to his feet and she watched him, her dispassionate gaze sweeping over him as he approached, taking in his erection, the dislodged face plate. Did she want him to beg? If he’d been asked half an hour before, his reaction would have been contempt, but right now he thought he might actually have been willing to drop to his knees before her and do it.

“I want you,” he said, his voice low.

A lazy cat-like smile spread across her face. Her throat was still flushed with the afterglow of orgasm, and when she pressed her hand against his chest, he mirrored the gesture. As he stepped close, she tilted her head up in invitation, and while he kissed her, slow and deep, she slid her hand down to his erection and squeezed it through the leather, making him groan into her mouth.

“All in good time,” she said, stepping away briskly. There was promise in her voice and in the tolerant glance she gave him, but the edge to her voice said that there was a limit to that tolerance. “In the meantime, start making arrangements for our departure.”

“Understood.”

She’d already turned away. He adjusted himself, glared at her back, then turned towards the door.

“Oh, and Travis?”

There was a traitorous little leap of hope in his heart. “Supreme Commander?” he said, taking great pleasure in the way the words felt on his lips.

She cast him an almost pitying look. “Tidy yourself up first.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Well, if that was the way she wanted to play it…

It stung at first, the way they’d left it, and the business about Maryatt bothered him too. They hadn’t been friends by any definition of the word, but Maryatt had been a man to whom Travis owed a debt, and Servalan’s posting him as a deserter meant that his family would be exiled as labour slaves on some far-distant planet. Nothing he could do about that now, but the matter niggled at him. At least making the necessary arrangements according to her exacting specifications served as a distraction.

Even taking Maryatt out of the equation, he had good reason to be uneasy. He could see quite clearly how she’d manoeuvred herself between him and the Federation, acting as his patron, binding him to her by ties of secrecy, If this went wrong, he was the one who’d made the arrangements on the quiet; it was on his head that the axe would fall, and he considered very carefully what alternative options he might have, whether he should report it, and, if so, to whom? But he could think of no one who’d both be willing to listen to him and whom he could trust not to report back to her. Besides, he’d come this far already. Most likely – almost certainly – it was already too late. He was her creature now and he couldn’t see any way out.

The ship was small but fast, two-person, with two bunk rooms separated by a thin alloy wall, and corridors so narrow they couldn’t pass without brushing against each other. The trails of her perfume that lingered in the corridors, the same one she’d been wearing then, caused in him a visceral Pavlovian reaction each time the scent caught him unawares.

She kept him on a steady simmer, a practised hand at stringing men along, but just because he recognised what she was doing didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy it. And he was enjoying himself, he was surprised to find, and for the first time in longer than he could remember. There was a sort of mingled pain and pleasure in the way she behaved towards him, one moment distant and chilly, the next laying her hand against his arm or chest or cheek, her breath on his skin as she leaned close to glance at something on his console, and all the while he could feel something developing, gathering weight and meaning, gradually taking shape between them.

Whatever game she was playing, he was willing to wait, and while he waited he wondered what might have happened if he’d called her bluff that day and refused to be dismissed so easily. Whether the whole affair might have been a test: if she’d still wanted to see how much he was willing to take. Or how much he was willing to take for himself.

It had been a long, long time since he’d played this sort of game.

Here on the ship he was no longer out of his element, and he was a patient man. There was no more luxury here, no more fresh flowers. The air wasn’t perfumed, but stale and recirculated, and there was nothing to eat or drink but field rations, recycled water, extremely bad coffee and even worse tea. It gave him a bitter little stab of pleasure to think of Servalan sleeping on the hard, uncomfortable bunk in her cabin which was as cramped as his was, and the wall between their cabins was so thin he could feel his own bunk quiver as she tossed and turned on the narrow mattress. And when he gripped his cock, idly daydreaming what her real bed might be like, he hoped she could feel his movements in turn. The slap of skin on skin, remembering the way she’d smelled, the way she’d tasted, the sounds she made as she came. The way it had felt to have her hand skimming over the prosthesis, for no other reason than to let him know he couldn’t stop her from doing anything to him.

Well, the tables were turned now. He just hoped she realised it.

And if she was somewhat out of depth on the ship, then she was even further out of her depth on Aristo. The underground tunnels were wet and dank and reeking, the air thick with the saline tang of rotting seaweed, and with some other odour beneath that: something sulphurous and reptilian. Their footsteps were drowned out by the hollow booming of the distant waves, funnelled through the rock. The ground was gritty with sand, ridges of lichen-slicked rocks slippery underfoot, and Servalan moved beside him both as silent as a ghost and as white as one too, and not just because of her clothes. She was standing too close, brushing up against him. He could hear her breathing too, shallow and fast-paced: and it dawned on him with a slow, spreading pleasure that she was afraid. He was the one with the power now; she needed him and they both knew it.

There was something in the tunnels with them. He’d glimpsed it trailing after them, and heard it too, the rattle of its breath in mucus-filled lungs, and there were other signs to indicate the tunnels were inhabited: claw-marks in the rock, trails in the wet sand.

He’d judged they weren’t in any immediate danger. Not from the creatures in the tunnels, anyway: his main concern was the roof caving in. His lazeron gun wouldn’t do a damned bit of good against several thousand gallons of seawater.

When he deliberately left her alone to scout on ahead, it gave him the keenest, sharpest pleasure to hear her crying out his name in terror. He’d grinned savagely at the pile of rubble, waited a beat before turning back. No point in making it too easy for her.

Seeing her gave him a strange feeling. Not just vindication or triumph (although he felt both to a certain extent), but the last thing he would have ever expected to feel in relation to Servalan: a stab of protectiveness. Only for an instant, and weak at that, but it was there all the same. She still had a luminous beauty, especially in the darkness and despite her ridiculously impractical clothes (which were still somehow bafflingly pristine). She recovered quickly, her fear and helplessness vanishing as she regained her usual composure.

Impossible, as little as he wanted to, and as much as it complicated matters, not to admire her. To feel a little proud – and it had been a long time since he’d been proud of anything other than his service and his men – of being her creature, her attack dog. Even on a choke chain. Even if it meant he had to kneel at her feet and beg for the scraps she fed him from her slender perfect fingers.

When he set a charge to get into the laboratory, he covered her body with his, shielding her from the blast, his hands pressed against the rock on either side of her waist – not touching, he was _very_ careful not to touch – but so close she must have been able to feel his breath on her skin. She raised her eyes to his as the tunnel shook about them with the force of the explosion, and he felt her hand against his chest.

She had enemies amongst the council, just as he did. They were like sharks, her sort, massing at the first hint of blood in the water. And it was really nothing more than an idle pleasant thought, the possibility that allied they might be able to face them together.

It was not, as it turned out, a thought that would last for long.

He should have known Blake would be there. Should have known it would all go to hell. One dead or dying man, she’d said, with defences that should have been relatively easy to bypass.

Instead, Blake had got there first and found the thing called Orac, whatever the hell that was. Another chance for revenge dangled in front of him and snatched away. Blake and the Auronar woman had been at his mercy, but Servalan had ordered him to wait.

His own weakness for obeying, when what he should have done was fire immediately and put a stop to the whole bloody mess then and there. He should have known they’d be ambushed themselves by Blake’s associates, the fraudster, Avon, reducing his prosthetic hand to a useless tangle of twisted metal with a blast from his gun.

And one other thing he should have known: that at the last she’d turn on him. That, well... that was something he really should have seen coming.

  
  


* * *

  
  


He couldn’t see clearly in that moment. The pain was blinding, streaming up the false connections of his prosthetic arm and into his skull. There was only one thing he knew for certain: he’d already been running out of chances and there was one fewer now.

A flat voice. Questions-that-weren’t-questions. The ever-present threat of the retraining therapists they could set on him. Perhaps they already had and he just didn’t remember.

He stripped off what was left of his prosthetic arm, breathing hard through the pain. Painkillers might have helped, but he needed his head clear, especially now, when the memories of his interrogation were rising to his mind. The last thing he needed to do was cloud his thoughts further.

This time would be so much worse. His position was even more precarious, and _she_ was right there behind him, ready to push. He wrenched the arm off, leaving the stump of his shoulder, capped with metal, and flung the prosthesis onto his bunk in a sudden rush of blinding fury so intense he couldn’t quite breathe with the intensity of it.

He’d come so close. If he’d just fired the moment Blake emerged, without allowing himself to be held back by Servalan... and for what? To find out what had happened to one dying old man, something which they could very well have discovered for themselves with ease once Blake and his followers were dead? They’d have had all the time in the world then.

His memories from the time of the inquiry were still hazy, fogged over by drugs and sleep-deprivation, but a memory came swimming up out of that haze: bleak reflective eyes, questions posed in a voice so unemotional it barely sounded human. He had no memory of physical pain from that time, or not consciously at least, but he remembered waking to find his throat hoarse as if he’d been screaming for hours. His mind was only too keen to play tricks on him, and it tangled together in his memory with the time after his injuries, when there had been nothing but pain, when he’d seemed less a man than a thing which had been stripped back to nothing but raw nerves and agony.

In an interrogation it was often easier to get the lie you wanted than the unvarnished truth, he knew that only too well, and they could have drawn it out from him inch by agonising inch if they’d chosen, whatever they wanted it to be, it didn’t much matter. Back then his mind had been breaking apart at the edges. The few times he had slept, waking up had felt more like clawing his way out of unconsciousness. The exhaustion was bone-deep, making his thoughts woolly, and a constant headache had pressed in a tight knotting ache at the base of his skull.

He still had gaping holes in his memories, black and bleak, empty as the vacuum of space, and there were times when he woke and his voice had already given out. Minutes, hours, days, god knew how long, he’d never get those memories back. He’d read all the literature when he’d captured Blake so he knew they couldn’t erase memories, but what they could do was prevent memories from being created, a sort of artificially-induced alcoholic blackout without the numbing relief of alcohol.

There’d be a file on him somewhere, every stolen memory, everything they’d done to him while he screamed and begged for mercy, knowing he’d never get it, and that they wouldn’t even grant him enough dignity to remember.

He was nearing the end of his usefulness. They’d make an example of him soon, as if he was anything more than what they’d turned him into. They’d want a scapegoat for this fool’s errand and its mishandling, and it didn’t take a puppeteer to see who that was going to be. And all of it – his pain, his frustration, and resentment – all combined into a terrible bleak rage, with an intensity that he’d not felt since that moment on Earth years ago when he’d seen Blake, not happy exactly, but complacent, leading a comfortable cosseted life, and in a position, whatever the reality of the situation, to look upon Travis with _pity_.

It was overwhelming.

He stumbled into the ship’s cabin, not sure what he was going to do or say, and stopped dead at the sight of her, still pristine.

She lifted her head, and looked at him, her expression not the one he was expecting, but naked frustration at their failure. “Why haven’t we left, Travis? We need to return to headquarters as soon as possible. It’s too much to hope we won’t have been missed, but–”

“Not yet,” he said, throat hoarse, flexing his remaining hand. “There’s something we need to discuss.”

Something shifted in her expression. Her face smoothed over as she straightened up. A flash of something in her eyes, something very much like contempt, and whatever was left of his control snapped and he was moving towards her then, shoving her back against the bulkhead.

He was hard already, and his one good hand clamped vice-like around her wrist, squeezing tight as he pressed between her legs, kissing her with the same violence with which she’d once kissed him.

She caught his tongue between her teeth, bit down so hard he felt the crunch. His mouth flooded with blood.

Breathing hard, he reared back and met her frostbitten eyes. “Supreme–” he started to say and she slapped him hard, a sharp crack of her hand across his cheek.

He bared his teeth at her.

Then her fingers curled in his uniform and she jerked him back down into a kiss, open-mouthed and savage while she scrabbled at the opening of his trousers. She wrenched them open and freed his cock. He jolted at the sensation of her hand squeezing around the base, but needed no encouragement to tear at her clothes in turn, yanking her underwear to one side. With his hand under her backside to support her weight, he lifted and crushed her against the bulkhead while she wrapped her legs around his waist, positioning him at her entrance. He braced himself awkwardly against the wall, and then he’d sheathed himself inside her and it seemed a culmination of everything that had been leading up to this moment. It ought to have felt like a victory – this was what he’d wanted after all – but it didn’t feel like anything of the sort.

He paused a moment to adjust his grip and the angle, and then he kept pausing, something twisting in his chest. She gripped the back of his neck, one moment gentle, the next digging in her nails while she rolled her hips downwards onto his cock. He caught his breath, then began to fuck her, each rough thrust slamming her against the bulkhead while she clawed at him. He dropped his head to her throat, kissed the tender skin beneath her ear, her hair brushing velvet-soft against his cheek.

Fast and hard and brutal: he’d wanted this for a long time, and now he found he just wanted it to be over. God knew how she managed to make him feel like he was being used, even though he was supposed to be the one fucking her. He resented utterly that she came first, that, indeed, she came at all, clenching tight around his cock with her head thrown back. He watched her face grimly as she came, taking little pleasure in it, because he’d wanted to leave her as unfulfilled as she’d left him, hating too that he couldn’t seem to stop looking at her lips, red and shining, stained with his blood. Even now there was something bewitching about her.

When his own orgasm hit, he shuddered, still able to feel the pulsing quiver of her cunt around his cock. He groaned into her throat, the last echoes of his pleasure ebbing. He released her, and her legs slid down, unwinding from around his waist. He hurt all over, what was left of his shoulder, his scalp, a myriad of petty little hurts, and when he spoke his voice was as raw as it had been every time he’d woken after those stolen hours.

“What are they going to do to me?”

“Self-pity doesn’t suit you, Travis.” She pressed her hand against his cheek, trying to push his head back so she could see his face. “There’ll have to be another inquiry of course.”

“Of course,” he echoed bitterly.

“You know you have my full support–”

“Officially or unofficially?”

“That depends on the result,” she said, and he gave a sharp humourless laugh. Her hand played in his hair at the base of his skull. “I’ll do what I can to protect you. No one else could.” A pause. “No one else _would_.”

It occurred to him then, a possibility which hadn’t quite coalesced until that moment, although he’d glimpsed it from time to time, a half-formed dream which he hadn’t yet recognised. Like so much else in his life, it was Blake’s fault, Blake who by all rights ought to have been dead twenty times over by now.

He could run.

He didn’t have Blake’s ship, but while it was fast it was conspicuous, and he had another advantage: he knew how the Federation worked. He wasn’t foolish enough to think he’d survive forever, but then he didn’t need to. Survival wasn’t the most pressing matter: Blake was, and while he didn’t have transport that could match the capabilities of Blake’s ship, he didn’t need it. He knew some of the pockets of resistance scattered through the galaxies, and more importantly he knew Blake. Travis didn’t have to catch up with him; he could put out the word, and Blake might well come to him if he could make it convincing enough.

He pulled back slowly, brought his lips to hers. A slow kiss, pressing deep into her mouth with his stinging, bloodied tongue, while he closed his hand around her throat. Wanting to see her expression, he pulled back, but she disappointed him in that too; there was fear in her eyes, but not nearly enough.

“You should have given Blake to me,” he said.

Very gently, almost curious to see what might happen and idly fascinated at how fragile her throat looked beneath his hand, he pressed his thumb over her thyroid cartilage. A little awkward: it was tricky with just the one hand, but he’d make do. He’d killed plenty of people, women included, but he’d never strangled anyone to death before. Not like this. And really, she should have seen it coming. She’d known what he was; she was at least partly responsible for what he was – keep a savage dog on a choke chain, and you couldn’t be surprised when it turned on you and ripped your throat out.

When she tried to speak, he eased off.

“What exactly is it you plan to do?” she asked. “Kill me and go after Blake?”

“You could always let me go.”

“You know I could never manage without you, Travis.” She caught hold of his wrist. “There’s something you ought to see first.”

“You’re stalling for time, Supreme Commander.”

“Very probably,” she agreed. “But I’m unarmed and you have me quite at your mercy. What possible harm could I do to you? You can indulge me a little, surely?”

He hesitated, then gave a nod, circling around behind her as she moved towards the console, smoothing out her clothes. He watched her with a look of wary boredom as she pressed a series of buttons and called up a vid on the screen, tapping a series of buttons until the tinny audio filled the cabin. He wasn’t actually listening, not until he caught the word _Blake,_ and that got his attention. Servalan cast him a look over her shoulder, not quite smiling. One of their files on Blake, he wondered, which he’d somehow missed? But surely he’d seen everything by now, unless she’d kept something back. He wouldn’t have put it past her, although the voice of the recording certainly didn’t sound like Blake.

It took him a few more moments to place that slurred and unfamiliar voice as his own. He elbowed roughly past her, staring at the screen, at a version of himself he barely remembered. Not all that long ago, but it seemed so much longer.

He looked like shit. More so than usual anyway, his skin bleached-out, waxy pale and shining with perspiration, contrasting starkly with the ugly black scab of his facial prosthesis. There were heavy shadows beneath his sunken eye.

– _went to visit Blake on Earth_ , a voice off-screen said, and that flat monotone at least was familiar.

_No._

He sank down into the chair. Servalan came close behind him, placing her hand on the back rest.

_The evidence is quite beyond dispute. There can be no doubt in the matter. You talked with him._

_No, I did not._

_But you concede that you were there._

Silence. On the screen, he was looking to one side, gnawing at his lip. An obsessive tic caused by the drugs, no doubt.

_Commander Travis._

His gaze snapped back, his eye wide, his cheeks hollowed out by his clenched jaw. _Yes?_

_You concede that you saw the resister known as Roj Blake on Earth._

_No, I don’t concede– I was_ there _, I admit that, I’ve never made a secret of it, but…_

_You spoke with him._

_No._

_You saw him._

_Yes._

_You went looking for him._

_...Yes..._

His attention was wandering again, drifting off to the side. The bleeping. He couldn’t hear it over the speakers, except as a dull thrum at the edge of his hearing, but back when this was recorded it would have consumed his attention.

_Your focus on me, if you please, Commander Travis._

_...What?..._

_For what reason did you go looking for Blake._

On the screen, he’d been so fixed on something out of shot he seemed not to have understood the question. There was a manic intensity about his one remaining eye as he turned back to face the investigator, his hands flexing and the bleak shadow of _guilt_ crawling over the twitching muscles of his face.

Then suddenly, unexpectedly, a smile spread across his face. His lips drew back from his teeth and his head dropped back, and he laughed, the sound half-mad and humourless, directed up at the ceiling, and Travis kept staring, his mouth dry, unable to look away, because he knew now what this was and why Servalan insisted he ought to see it, just one little thing before he murdered her, hardly important at all, really, and even though he couldn’t remember this exact exchange, which had been one amongst hundreds, he knew suddenly what he was about to see once that previous version of himself, a stranger, broken and bitter and utterly unfamiliar, dropped his head back down, still shaking with the last echoes of his laughter as he grinned wildly off screen at where the investigator sat.

_I was curious._

He paused the feed, his heart hammering. “No one would believe it.”

“Oh Travis.” She leaned in close, resting her chin on his shoulder, her cheek against his. “No one who mattered would _care_. It would be simpler by far to have you denounced as a defector. There’d certainly be far fewer awkward questions from the bleeding hearts on the council about massacres and war crimes to have to deal with. No, you have one friend in the Federation, and that’s me. I’m the only one who can give you Blake. Without my support you wouldn’t get within ten million spacials of him.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’ve made certain of it.”

“ _How?_ ”

“You can’t expect me to give away all my secrets.” She traced the outline of the facial prosthesis, running her fingers up into his hairline, then nodded to the screen. “Is that really how you want to be remembered? I’m your only chance, Travis. It’s rarely a wise move to kill the only ally you have.”

“Maybe I should make an exception in your case.”

Her smile was genuine, almost fond. “That’s very probable too.”

Slowly, he turned in the seat to stare at her, the realisation dawning.

“It was you,” he said, “You gave them the questions to ask.” No reply, Servalan gave him an enigmatic smile, her hand on her throat, her thumb brushing against the tender spot where he’d pressed his thumb. His gaze turned back to the screen, to his own frozen face, still caught in the act of smiling. If that could be called a smile. He thought about those stolen minutes, the time he’d never now get back, a cold sensation rushing through his veins, flooding him with dread. “What else is on these recordings?”

“If you kill me now you’ll never know.” She laid her hand on his arm. “Is it the inquiry that frightens you? It’s just a formality–”

“ _That_ was a formality.” He gestured savagely towards the screen. He’d known it was bad, but seeing it, seeing himself drugged and disoriented, stumbling around the questions, bleached white and sallow beneath the lights, brought it back in horrible detail, the empty spaces in his memories, like missing teeth, black empty spaces filled with terrors. Worse, almost, that he couldn’t remember. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten them: they’d never existed in the first place. They could have done _anything_ to him.

But even then, if he ran it would be a thousand times worse. Worse even than anything Blake would have gone through. Resisters were to be suppressed, but traitors and defectors were to be obliterated and the earth where they’d stood scorched and salted. He was only lucky he had no family left.

He’d known all his life what it meant to serve. He’d known what they demanded of you, which was _everything_ : life, heart, soul, you were expected to hand it all over and more besides. When the Federation held out its greedy hands and demanded more, god help those who baulked.

They hollowed you out from the inside out, ate away at you until there was almost nothing left, and it still wasn’t enough, not for them, nothing could ever be enough, and by the time you realised that, it was too late and there was nothing else that could be done, because by then you’d be in it up to your neck yourself, you’d be the one holding out your hand and demanding that others walk through fire and wade through blood, for you, for the massed ranks of the Federation behind you, and if one fell, all would fall, and there was no alternative left, and the only thing that mattered was duty.

“You told me you didn’t break that easily, Travis,” she said. “Don’t disappoint me now.”

He shuddered. Dropped his head back. And found, against all the odds, that he was grinning.

“Never, Supreme Commander.”


End file.
